"Identity," change, other stuff

mental bric-a-brac

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Identity and freedom

It’s often difficult for me to figure out when I’m projecting as compared to when I’m empathizing (not “sympathizing,” empathizing, as in, “correctly understanding the motivations of another person whether I like or dislike those motivations”). Humans can’t understand other humans without appealing first to our own experience as a human, and extrapolating that to other people.

Perhaps a mix of projection and empathizing is simply the state of things.

You will have to judge whether you think I’m projecting or empathizing, or both, about this. Here’s what I think.

Most people have the capacity to stop thinking of themselves as a “branded identity.” They have the capacity to think of themselves first and primarily as humans, not first and primarily as a “gay man” or a “black woman” or “an indigenous person” or a “__________ person.”

People think they don’t have this capacity because we live in an aberrant time in which we’ve been told a lie about “identity” that few if any humans believed in any other era or place.

Women can stop seeing themselves as “feminists chained to patriarchy.” Gays can stop seeing themselves as “homosexuals oppressed by the normal reality of heterosexuality.” Insert any group identity you want; it works the same way.

Why do I think almost anyone can rise above this? Because I did. That’s not a brag; it’s actually the opposite. Until the past 8 years, I sold my own ability to grow so short that I did little growing up. Looking back, I was chained even more securely to a false and limiting sense of my “identity as a leftist gay man” than I knew.

My assessment of myself is this: